Investigating behavioural and computational approaches for defining imprecise regions

ABSTRACT

People often communicate with reference to informally agreed places, such as “the city centre”. However, views of the spatial extent of such areas may vary, resulting in imprecise regions. We compare perceptions of Sheffield’s City Centre from a street survey to extents derived from various web-based sources. Such automated approaches have advantages of speed, cost and repeatability. We show that footprints from web sources are often in concordance with models derived from more labour-intensive methods. Notable exceptions however were found with sources advertising or selling residential property. Agreement between sources was measured by aggregating them to identify locations of consensus.

KEYWORDS:

• Geographic information retrieval
• place
• spatial cognition
• social media
• vague geography

Acknowledgments

The authors like to thank Ordnance Survey (CASE/CAN/06/67) for funding this research on representation of place for geographic information retrieval. This work has also been partly funded by the EC FP6-IST 045335 TRIPOD project and partially supported by the EPSRC.

Supplementary material

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Notes

¹ There are about 3,000 postcode districts in the UK, a full UK postcode represents on average 15 households.